The Japanese word for bread is “pan”, reflecting how much Asian and African cuisine has really been Portuguese fusion for centuries now (well, I guess to the extent spaghetti and tomato sauce is Sino-Mesoamerican fusion, at least)
Basically at any time you are in Japan, you are at the coast (the plains count), in the mountains, in the foothills, on Hokkaido, on a minor outlying island, or at Lake Biwa.
So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).
If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)
@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?
Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like “oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it”
The major elements were
Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating “rotten borough” districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies
So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.
Finding out that the creator of Ultraman was Catholic so he made Ultraman getting crucified a recurring thing of the franchise and that became influential in tokusatsu and anime is so funny to me. This is the funniest thing to come from Catholicism
In Japanese, I’m told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that— I don’t know Japanese, I’m making this up— if a syllable changes in one word, then “the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight” becomes “the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection.” I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.
does anyone know if this is a real thing UKLG is referring to? if so, word for it, examples?
which looks like is just “japanese has a lot of homophones and poets will use them for artistic effect,” more or less the same as they will in english
Yeah a lot of it is that Japanese (a non-tonal language) repeatedly borrowed words from tonal Chinese, stripping them of tone (so that several words once distinct were now identical) and then re-borrowed the same roots centuries later after meaning and pronunciation had drifted, with the result that there are a ton of words that sound the same and punning is a major feature of Japanese-language culture.
It is huge in Japanese poetry (where the regular suffixed conjugation makes end rhyme trivial), the most honored stuff – even stuff you might be familiar and impressed with – translates poorly because you can only translate one meaning at a time, lacking the centuries of cultural context that would make the others even make sense.
Often the Chinese borrowings were primarily in a literary written context and semantic drift between the borrowings, Chinese language sounds, and Japanese sounds had proceeded differently in terms of written characters and sound. Sometimes the borrowings were from dialects that used completely different sounds for the same characters.
Haiku developed from a form of battle rap where competitors alternated verses and the goal was to continue the poem while retroactively forcing reinterpretations of your opponent’s lines
In Japanese, I’m told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that— I don’t know Japanese, I’m making this up— if a syllable changes in one word, then “the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight” becomes “the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection.” I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.
does anyone know if this is a real thing UKLG is referring to? if so, word for it, examples?
which looks like is just “japanese has a lot of homophones and poets will use them for artistic effect,” more or less the same as they will in english
Yeah a lot of it is that Japanese (a non-tonal language) repeatedly borrowed words from tonal Chinese, stripping them of tone (so that several words once distinct were now identical) and then re-borrowed the same roots centuries later after meaning and pronunciation had drifted, with the result that there are a ton of words that sound the same and punning is a major feature of Japanese-language culture.
It is huge in Japanese poetry (where the regular suffixed conjugation makes end rhyme trivial), the most honored stuff – even stuff you might be familiar and impressed with – translates poorly because you can only translate one meaning at a time, lacking the centuries of cultural context that would make the others even make sense.
